Scattered Thoughts on Sophie Treadwell's Machinal: An Informal Talk on the Occasion of its Opening Performance at the Antioch Theater, 1996
Jean Gregorek
Antioch College
Department of Literature
During the spring of 1927 playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell was a spectator at the notorious Ruth Snyder murder trial, the most sensational and widely-covered courtroom drama of the late twenties. On March 20, Albert Snyder was found murdered in his bed, having been beaten in his sleep with a curtain weight and strangled with a piece of picture wire. His thirty-two-year-old blonde wife and here lover of about a year, a travelling corset and brassiere salesman named Judd Gray, were arrested and accused of the murder. After twenty hours of questioning, Ruth Snyder confessed to murdering her husband to escape a brutal and unhappy marriage. While at first she claimed that she and Gray had planned the murder together, she later changed her story to say that it was Gray who had actually concocted the idea and that she had been unable to stop him. Similarly, faced with the possibility of the death penalty, he changed his story and named Ruth as the orchestrator of the crime. And so the public and the jury had to decide which of the conspirators to believe. In court, Gray’s defense lawyer argued successfully that Ruth was indeed the real villain of the piece – a “cold, heartless, calculating mastermind,” she had destroyed not one man but two. Gray had been helplessly caught in the clutches of a “deadly, conscienceless abnormal woman, a human serpent, a human fiend in the guise of a woman…He…was drawn into this hopeless chasm, when reason was gone, when manhood was gone, and when his mind was absolutely weakened by lust and by passion and by abnormal relations…This woman, this peculiar venomous species of humanity, was abnormal, possessed of an all-consuming, all-absorbing passion, an animal lust, which seemingly was never satiated.”
In stark contrast to Ruth Snyder’s supposedly insatiable cravings for sex and power, what was most frequently noted about Gray was his surprising normality. Psychiatrists examining Gray found him to be “very affable,” and could only explain his involvement in first-degree murder as the police, the defense, and the jury did: “all facts point to a love-mad man completely in the sway of a woman whose will was steel, and brain active and intelligent.” After the trial, one juror told the New York Times, “We all knew that Mrs. Snyder was lying…we all believed every word that Gray said.”
Public opinion remained overwhelmingly on the side of Gray as the hapless victim of an oversexed femme fatale (apparently it made no difference that Gray, like Snyder, was married, that he, too, had been deceiving his spouse, and that he had had many other extramarital affairs). Journalists reporting on the trial described him as “a kindhearted man at bottom,” “the kind of fellow who’d do anything in the world for somebody he liked,” and a weakling who “couldn’t put up a croquet set without help.” Snyder was dubbed “The Granite Woman” and the “Blonde Fiend” by the tabloid press – Gray’s nickname was “Lover Boy” – despite the fact that he was three years older. Both were found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing, although significantly (and this is what I find most intriguing about this trial), the version offered by Gray’s lawyer is the account of the crime which has gone into textbooks, psychological case studies, and criminology history.
As even the New York Post noted at the time, Ruth Snyder was always on trial more for adultery than for murder, and since she confessed to the former she was undoubtedly evil enough to have done the latter, too. Ruth Snyder came to exemplify female desire out of control, and the inversion of the ‘natural’ hierarchy of male dominance was used as evidence that gender transgression inevitably leads to transgression against the entire social order. In her thoughtful discussion of the Snyder trial in Women Who Kill (from which I have taken much of the above account), Ann Jones speculates that the case became a touchstone for larger cultural anxieties around the more openly sexual woman of the twenties. Against the backdrop of the Jazz Age, Ruth Snyder’s demonization served as a decisive lesson to pleasure-seeking modern women who wanted too much out of life.
Sophie Treadwell’s play Machinal was first produced just eight months after the electrocution of Ruth Snyder. Many of the details of Treadwell’s drama directly recall elements of the Snyder case – Snyder, like the protagonist of Machinal, Helen Jones, came from a working-class family, had a mother to support, was an office worker who married her much older boss, discovered happiness in an extramarital affair, killed, or helped to kill, her sleeping husband with a convenient household object, was betrayed by her lover, and became the center of a media whirlwind. Treadwell’s play also draws on Ruth Snyder’s statements that sexual relations with her husband were “so disgusting and degrading that she felt like killing him,” and the fact that, on their wedding night, Ruth Snyder complained of illness, refused to go to her new home and stayed with her mother. And of course Helen Jones turns to the tabloids for inspiration for the murder – possibly reading the reports of the Snyder case itself: “Woman finds husband dead.”
Interestingly, Treadwell does not pick up on reports of Albert Snyder’s violence towards his wife and child, preferring to emphasize, not male violence or female victimization, but the more existential condition of the absence of female freedom. Treadwell’s Young Girl does not make the case, as the real Ruth Snyder did, that her actions were largely in self-defense. Instead the play highlights the less dramatic and more subtle, commonplace pressures of being “forced to submit.”
The wave of male anxieties raised by the Ruth Snyder murder trail and which were put to rest by her execution on January of 1928 are not, in retrospect, difficult to analyze – if female sexual dissatisfaction can erupt into murder, then an awful lot of men are at risk. What was done to Albert Snyder in his sleep seemingly could have happened to any husband. Thus the legal system, the mass media and the new ‘science’ of criminology collaborated in localizing the problem, constructing Ruth Snyder as an aberration, a masculine, unwomanly woman, and a “fiend in woman’s guise.”
Treadwell’s play questions this reassuring assessment of the case and deliberately sets out to counter the portrayal of Ruth Snyder as unnatural and exceptional. The play’s stage directions clearly specify that she could be “any young girl.” Far from being a controlling, castrating type, Treadwell’s Young Girl is shown to be herself powerless before the combined machinery of the law, the family, the medical establishment, organized religion, and the economic system, all of which refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of her expectations and desires. One of Helen Jones's last statements to her husband, in response to his insistence on her purity, is to contradict him: “No – I’m just like everybody else.” While this assertion reinforces Helen's typicality as a woman and as a human being, in the context of their discussion she is refuting male myths of female asexuality. Her yearnings (for fresh air, for a handsome young man with curly hair, for peace, etc.) are continually rendered throughout the play as points of resistance to the elaborate workings of the social machinery; from the first she is constructed as hopelessly “inefficient.” The play’s chilling conclusion witnesses her silencing but never condemns her desires. Her final cry is again for “Somebody” – for the non-instrumentalized human connection which she has never found, or for the lover she has always dreamed of.
While the public discourse around the real trial of Ruth Snyder linked female sexual freedom to murder and mayhem, Treadwell’s play may be read as arguing the exact opposite – that in fact it is the repression of natural or ordinary desires, and specifically female sexual desire, which drives women to violence. Treadwell’s play works to expose the limitations of the various prewritten scripts of female fulfillment – daughterhood, motherhood, career, marriage, adultery and 'whoredom.' Depending upon how one views the play’s conclusion, it may also be commenting on the illusory freedom of heterosexual love and romance. Certainly the point seems to be that there is no freedom for women in this world, no place where female desire can exist outside of the overarching machinery of masculine control. As Jill Dolan writes, “While we might now theorize gendered positrons that offer women greater agency, Machinal is a grim reminder of the webs of social discourse that constrain our positive choice.”
Before we dismiss the various reinscriptions of Ruth Snyder as the naïve products of a less enlightened era, we might want to briefly consider how gender stereotypes and an implicitly masculine media perspective are still influencing public perceptions of criminals, victims, and, significantly, what counts as ‘violence’ itself. The tragic and fascinating case of Aileen Wuornos (still ongoing), the Florida prostitute sensationally labeled the “first female serial killer” after shooting seven of her customers comes immediately to mind. But perhaps the most notorious of a string of recent media-dubbed ‘castrating bitches’ is a ninety-five pound Ecuadoran immigrant whose very name has become a running joke – Lorena Bobbitt. As you may remember, there were actually two Bobbitt trials: the first trial was John Bobbitt’s trial for marital rape, and the second trial was her trial for ‘malicious wounding’--she cut off his penis. John Bobbitt was found not guilty of charges of rape, largely because prosecutors, identifying wholeheartedly with the traumatized husband, never took her allegations seriously. When her ‘extreme’ action was pitted against his ordinary boys-will-be-boys loutishness there was no contest. Like Judd Gray, Bobbitt was a clean-cut, All-American white guy; like Albert Snyder, he had been cruelly and inexplicably attacked in his sleep. And far from being ‘everywoman,’ Lorena was a man-hating hysteric, a sexual terrorist, an overly-excitable foreigner, a jealous Latin lover. What else was there to know?
In the second trial, prosecutors of Lorena were so sure they had the case wrapped up that they, too, neglected to check her side of the story. And so they were visibly surprised at the abundant evidence which emerged in her defense, as witness after witness came forward to corroborate Lorena’s original testimony. Police records showed that they had been called to the house eight times to break up domestic disputes, that Lorena Bobbitt had sent photographic evidence detailing physical abuse to the immigration service, that she had filed a restraining order the day before the attack (which had not yet gone into effect on a technicality), that Bobbitt had attended court-ordered counseling for his persistent spousal abuse, that numerous neighbors had witnessed his beatings of his wife, and that his own buddies came forward to testify that he bragged about making women “squeal, cry and bleed.” However, neither the popular media nor the law chose to view the case in the context of three years of continuous violence: three years of a six-foot tall ex-Marine beating up a five foot, two inch-tall woman proved nowhere near as newsworthy as her retaliatory attack on a particularly sensitive and highly symbolic part of the male anatomy.
Lorena Bobbitt was declared not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, much to the disgust of conservative commentators, who complained that this signaled open season on husbands and represented yet another abuse of the insanity defense. And her case remains useful for a snide joke on Letterman, as a convenient symptom of the increasing hostility between the sexes, or the disgraceful tabloidization of contemporary culture. She has come to signify many things, but rarely what she was – a victim of a criminal justice system which takes certain kinds of violent acts more seriously when the are done to men (after all, only his body qualified for the legal category of having been ‘maliciously wounded’), and a society more shocked by violent acts which threatened male bodily integrity.
One can think of numerous similar examples which dramatize the deeply gendered nature of determinations of ‘violence’ and the unfortunate frequency with which violence against women is still being cast as male prerogative or male sexual peccadillo. In order to demonstrate that he was truly tough on crime, one of Ohio Governor Voinovich’s first acts in office was to reverse the decision of the previous governor, Governor Celeste, to grant pardons to cases in which battered women in long-term abusive relationships had killed their husbands in self-defense. Patricia Bowman’s word (and the testimony of doctors in her local emergency room) proved an insufficient challenge to the moneyed interests of the Kennedy clan. Convicted child-killer Susan Smith’s stepfather has never been held accountable for what he has publicly admitted was ten years of sexual molestation, although he has now stepped down as minister of his local church. When Mike Tyson emerged from prison he arrived in Harlem to a hero’s welcome and a ticker-tape parade. John Bobbitt walks free and intact and has cashed in on his fifteen minutes of fame to develop a lucrative new career as a porn star and talk show celebrity. Apparently certain forms of violence remain less stigmatized, more normalized than others in the eyes of the law. And in all of these sensationalized cases one can uncover a subtext which anxiously demands the disciplining of the illicit or amoral female desires perceived to be running amok. Given recent trends in sexual politics, Treadwell’s earnest, thought-provoking critique of the double standard which lurks beneath the cold abstractions of the legal system should be given its due; in some ways it seems that Machinal’s meticulous depiction of the “machine that always works, “ is more timely than ever.
Works Cited
Berns, Walter. “Getting Away with Murder.” Commentary. April 1994. p. 25-29
Broomfield, Nick. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Video. USA, 1992.
Cole, Lewis. “Court TV.” The Nation. Vol. 258, No. 7. Feb 21, 1994. p. 243-45.
Dolan, Jill. Review of Machinal (Public Theater, New York City. October 1990). Theatre Review. March 92, p. 96-97.
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1980.
Jones, Jennifer. “In Defense of Woman: Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal.” Modern Drama. 37. 1994. p. 485-95.